While I do think much of the 'imbalance' in public games comes down to people doing the wrong things at the wrong times, expecting people to constantly improve their knowledge or skill is somewhat shortsighted. I have played from both sides of that coin, both as a competitive player and as a casual player. I can understand people who play just for the fun of playing, where the outcome matters little overall and there is no desire to improve. There are several problems when that kind of player plays a game like NS2 however, and honestly all the tutorials and rookie catering in the world wont change it. Tutorials are good for teaching the basics, and also teaching certain specific advanced techniques or ideals.. but that's really all the can ever hope to convey well.
Ideally a game like NS2 needs 3 (or 4) key things to allow players of all skill levels:
Good basic tutorials and a few advanced ones, which cover topics that lead into other advanced techniques (ie, evasive movement as a skulk teaches that being evasive as any alien is beneficial, the player can discover how to accomplish that as other lifeforms as they progress).
Progressive learning curve - NS2 actually has a reasonably decent progression, however much of the advanced techniques are invisible to players initially. Much like learning to bunny hop where you need to learn to 'let go of forward to move forward', these make it hard to progress without some kind of instruction.
Some kind of skill placement system in basic games. Like other 'competitive' shooters, matching newer players with vets is always a recipe for failure, NS2 is no different. There is no good way around this problem, if you 'nerf' vets to play in games with newer or lower skilled players, you just frustrate them as they are now fully reliant on their team, who may not understand the game very well. And I think we all know what happens to lower skill players in reverse.
The 4th which is somewhat optional but would still help, is more with regards to gameplay. There are aspects of gameplay which can occur normally in even 'balanced' matches of NS2, which can be very frustrating to the players. Some would point to hive 1 skulks vs W3 shotguns as an example.. The example can be debated but its more the results that are the issue, and that drives people away from the game too.
I'm sad I missed this game, I enjoy the challenge though its not sporting if they did stack intentionally, a polite "come on be nice chaps" might have helped. :-?
Here is an aspect to think about:
In public Counter-Strike and Moba games the only metric players care about is their sacred score.
Despite these games originally being designed as "team" games, they are being played like solipsistic exercises in narcissism where you don't communicate, don't coordinate, don't provide cover, backup or support and generally don't give a fuck about the rest of your team. At best, your team"mates" are "kill stealers" (heard that before?), i.e. they deprive you of what is rightfully yours.
I dare you to silently exchange all human players except 1 (the test subject) in a counter-strike game with bots. I'd bet that the one remaining human player would never notice the difference, because there is zero communication that would reveal the bots to him. He will keep playing for hours and never know that he has been trapped in his very own matrix.
Is this thread still going?! There is a massive skill difference and a massive player shortage. not enough people to maintain high skill servers 24/7 plus a dire competitive scene brings us all into one big cluster f¥ck and there is no viable solution. Welcome to ns2 2014, deal with it.
It's Super Effective!Join Date: 2012-08-28Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Let's see if we can hit page 14!.
As @tallhotblonde indicated, unless a particular group of players restrict themselves to certain kinds of servers, these varying skill ranges are more likely to face one another. Obviously people want to play with their friends, and there is nothing wrong with that. Thats why I am hoping people will adopt the Handicap Mod until the situation becomes better by means of more players, skill ranges.
If you want to try it, it's loaded on the Survival of the Fittest server, an EU server hosted by Ghoul (who made the mod).
The console command is sv_handicap (# between 0 - 1) 1 Being normal damage, 0.7 being 70% of your normal damage.
I find Marines is pretty hard at 10% nerf. I can manage %20 on aliens, but it makes the fights quite longer.
It's a bandaid for a core problem IronHorse. The problem is that there is no player base so the skill gap is astronomical in some cases and the way to fix it is definitely not this "mod" or whatever.
Uhm, yeah if we had 20 times the player base like you said and we had a decent matchmaking system like in CS:GO..
So until those lofty goals are achieved : 20,000 players and a working matchmaking system ... we can use this mod.
I don't see how an interim solution will hurt for those who remain skeptical about solving such a core issue.
(Also, those items are not the core of the issue, imo, they just hide it. As dragon later points out there's skill curves, tutorials and skill ceilings to be considered)
Playerbase just sucks right now, yes this "may" help a little for the short term, what the game needs is better match making, maybe an ingame lobby where its based on skill levels so people can find games etc, maybe alerts that lets players know there is a "MatchMaking" in progress so they can join if they have the alerts turned on,
This may help, but "pubstompers" will always be around it dont matter who they are, it would not matter if we have 20k+ players we would just hear less about it on these forums.
I would think those in the premier div would be good ambassadors of the game and thus want to help new (green) players to learn. I'm sure even those with 1000+hrs would be interested in learning a few pro-tips. ;;)
I don't understand why so many people think matchmaking can somehow do something to save this game.
I have yet to see, play, or even hear of a game with matchmaking that actually works and is an improvement in any way over a server browser. It would probably just kill the game even faster by segregating the already tiny community.
I see matchmaking being about as effective as ELO or score based teams are now, only with the added "benefit" of having to wait ages for it to group players together.
I'd say that matchmaking is terrible for any team game however. And it's especially not going to work in a small game like ns2. But we DO need to segregate the community imo. Matchmaking is just not the way to do it. We have to teach players to catagorize themselves in to low/mid/high skill and play within that group system.
Its not so much matchmaking that would save the game, take NSL gathers for example, if that was even some how implanted to ingame sort of matchmaking that would be alot better than what there is now, Nothing, and it would give players something different to play for
maybe a chat channel In-Game for players can gather up? like Counter Strike Online in Singapore they have In-game chat channel , players can shout out and join lobby
Ping suitable for players will make a server crowded
maybe a chat channel In-Game for players can gather up? like Counter Strike Online in Singapore they have In-game chat channel , players can shout out and join lobby
Ping suitable for players will make a server crowded
It would be interesting to see how many over people were sitting in the lobby waiting for a few server slots to open up. A chat box that you could see the online users in would be a nice addition. Obviously it would have to be localised, like a Europe one, an American one ect.
What you could then suggest (If there was enough people) is to join an empty server, hopefully having enough players to fill it up.
maybe a chat channel In-Game for players can gather up? like Counter Strike Online in Singapore they have In-game chat channel , players can shout out and join lobby
Ping suitable for players will make a server crowded
This seems like one of those ideas that makes you smack your forehead for not thinking of it sooner.
I cant tell you how long I sit in the browser waiting for a slot to open (yes, I'm one of those horrible people who hates to wait 30 min to seed a server before getting a game in)
I cant tell you how long I sit in the browser waiting for a slot to open (yes, I'm one of those horrible people who hates to wait 30 min to seed a server before getting a game in)
A chat would be awesome, since it would be multi-purpose for community-related stuff. It might be non-trivial to implement tho, using some existing LUA-Library to make a thin IRC-client could be the easiest solution for that.
If the objective would only be to rally players looking to join a server, I think there could be ways easier-to-implement than a chat. What came to my mind was just a button "All nice servers are full, but I would be willing to join an emtpy server if more people came quickly". The function could take the empty servers you have favorited (the heart symbol in the server browser), and increment some counter that is visible for everyone in the server list. It would count the players willing to join this server at the moment. If a counter at any empty server reaches the magic number (maybe 8 or 12?), it would be highlighted in the server browser as a server that is likely to be populated soon. Maybe the function could even auto-join you into this server, once it is found. Thoughts? @Mendasp pls?
Since this is Off-topic, I'll write this idea in a new thread, if I get some agree's, otherwise I wont bother
A couple of these threads have derailed into other topics which is kind of neat. You have to be mindful, what we think is an issue/problem of the game might just be the visible issue that we all encounter but the solution isn't always quite as visible.
Comments
Yeah. You're being optimistic about it. If we can get it to work, it will be awesome.
I'm being realistic about it. We are probably not going to make it work, so we should at least try to do something.
Ideally a game like NS2 needs 3 (or 4) key things to allow players of all skill levels:
Good basic tutorials and a few advanced ones, which cover topics that lead into other advanced techniques (ie, evasive movement as a skulk teaches that being evasive as any alien is beneficial, the player can discover how to accomplish that as other lifeforms as they progress).
Progressive learning curve - NS2 actually has a reasonably decent progression, however much of the advanced techniques are invisible to players initially. Much like learning to bunny hop where you need to learn to 'let go of forward to move forward', these make it hard to progress without some kind of instruction.
Some kind of skill placement system in basic games. Like other 'competitive' shooters, matching newer players with vets is always a recipe for failure, NS2 is no different. There is no good way around this problem, if you 'nerf' vets to play in games with newer or lower skilled players, you just frustrate them as they are now fully reliant on their team, who may not understand the game very well. And I think we all know what happens to lower skill players in reverse.
The 4th which is somewhat optional but would still help, is more with regards to gameplay. There are aspects of gameplay which can occur normally in even 'balanced' matches of NS2, which can be very frustrating to the players. Some would point to hive 1 skulks vs W3 shotguns as an example.. The example can be debated but its more the results that are the issue, and that drives people away from the game too.
When i play Free Weekend Ringsing Storm / RedOchestra2 , game developers TriwareInteractive said : "Call of Duty nearly ruined a generation of FPS"
In public Counter-Strike and Moba games the only metric players care about is their sacred score.
Despite these games originally being designed as "team" games, they are being played like solipsistic exercises in narcissism where you don't communicate, don't coordinate, don't provide cover, backup or support and generally don't give a fuck about the rest of your team. At best, your team"mates" are "kill stealers" (heard that before?), i.e. they deprive you of what is rightfully yours.
I dare you to silently exchange all human players except 1 (the test subject) in a counter-strike game with bots. I'd bet that the one remaining human player would never notice the difference, because there is zero communication that would reveal the bots to him. He will keep playing for hours and never know that he has been trapped in his very own matrix.
As @tallhotblonde indicated, unless a particular group of players restrict themselves to certain kinds of servers, these varying skill ranges are more likely to face one another. Obviously people want to play with their friends, and there is nothing wrong with that. Thats why I am hoping people will adopt the Handicap Mod until the situation becomes better by means of more players, skill ranges.
If you want to try it, it's loaded on the Survival of the Fittest server, an EU server hosted by Ghoul (who made the mod).
The console command is sv_handicap (# between 0 - 1) 1 Being normal damage, 0.7 being 70% of your normal damage.
I find Marines is pretty hard at 10% nerf. I can manage %20 on aliens, but it makes the fights quite longer.
Is fixed since over a day. Turned out the name was formated another time sometimes and you know what happens in string.format with a single lonely "%"
I don't see how an interim solution will hurt for those who remain skeptical about solving such a core issue.
(Also, those items are not the core of the issue, imo, they just hide it. As dragon later points out there's skill curves, tutorials and skill ceilings to be considered)
Having known their CM since I was a kid, this was a real shock to me when this happened.
Playing without sound is actually very zen. Would highly suggest as another interim fix.
Ahhhhh, like in standards based learning? "You achieved: merit"
This may help, but "pubstompers" will always be around it dont matter who they are, it would not matter if we have 20k+ players we would just hear less about it on these forums.
I have yet to see, play, or even hear of a game with matchmaking that actually works and is an improvement in any way over a server browser. It would probably just kill the game even faster by segregating the already tiny community.
I see matchmaking being about as effective as ELO or score based teams are now, only with the added "benefit" of having to wait ages for it to group players together.
I'd say that matchmaking is terrible for any team game however. And it's especially not going to work in a small game like ns2. But we DO need to segregate the community imo. Matchmaking is just not the way to do it. We have to teach players to catagorize themselves in to low/mid/high skill and play within that group system.
Ping suitable for players will make a server crowded
It would be interesting to see how many over people were sitting in the lobby waiting for a few server slots to open up. A chat box that you could see the online users in would be a nice addition. Obviously it would have to be localised, like a Europe one, an American one ect.
What you could then suggest (If there was enough people) is to join an empty server, hopefully having enough players to fill it up.
This seems like one of those ideas that makes you smack your forehead for not thinking of it sooner.
I cant tell you how long I sit in the browser waiting for a slot to open (yes, I'm one of those horrible people who hates to wait 30 min to seed a server before getting a game in)
A chat would be awesome, since it would be multi-purpose for community-related stuff. It might be non-trivial to implement tho, using some existing LUA-Library to make a thin IRC-client could be the easiest solution for that.
If the objective would only be to rally players looking to join a server, I think there could be ways easier-to-implement than a chat. What came to my mind was just a button "All nice servers are full, but I would be willing to join an emtpy server if more people came quickly". The function could take the empty servers you have favorited (the heart symbol in the server browser), and increment some counter that is visible for everyone in the server list. It would count the players willing to join this server at the moment. If a counter at any empty server reaches the magic number (maybe 8 or 12?), it would be highlighted in the server browser as a server that is likely to be populated soon. Maybe the function could even auto-join you into this server, once it is found. Thoughts? @Mendasp pls?
Since this is Off-topic, I'll write this idea in a new thread, if I get some agree's, otherwise I wont bother
-.- you get a slap for that